ILF POST

Therapist, thinker, speaker, teacher, writer, consultant.

“I listen carefully, try to be of use, and take my recreation in the arts” – Confucius

I have three grown engaged and uniquely creative children, and wonderful friends spread all over, I have lived first in Manhattan, then Southern and Northern California, Boston, Mexico City, Washington DC, Martha’s Vineyard, Whidbey Island near Seattle, and now on the Russian River in Sonoma County, California.

For the last thirty years I have been a psychoanalyst, professor, organizational consultant, and exec at two small internet companies that used on-line conferences to help with internal communications. In 1998 I started a newsletter called y2k week (archived at www.dougcarmichael.com/y2kweek). All along I have been actively reading history, philosophy and related thinkers with a focus on cultural change – anthropology, political science, literary theory, and looking at the next steps after we learned that y2k was as much a social phenomena as a technical one – basically about how people form opinions when there is not sufficient evidence, and how the reality never emerges, because people tend to forget about it. For the last five years I’ve paid most attention to philanthropy and community development, especially the way smaller local and regional areas can gain more control – and be more creative – about local development.

The key themes in my life are organized around
Science
Psychoanalysis
Arts
Management consulting
Social concerns
Politics in an Internet age.

After Caltech I studied developmental psychology and wrote my dissertation at Berkeley on irony – a kind of Piagetian study looking at ways of integrating emotional and cognitive perspectives into a less split model. Irony was part of rhetoric and rhetoric was part of the classical trivium. I still consider this work ongoing. It was while studying physics as an undergrad and working in the physics labs at Caltech that I developed a sense that the people were even more interesting than the physics. I was surrounded by wonderful characters such as Feynman and Beadle and Bonenblust – and Jon Mathews wherever you are – and had great teachers as well in the humanities. Reading Yeats, Elliot, Mann and Joyce for a year with Hallett Smith was a great antidote to physics, and philosophy with Alfred Stern provided depth I used throughout the later travels, especially his introducing me to Cassirer Ortega, Unamuno and Vahinger. I still consider myself a scientist. Caltech led me to psychology through Oppenheimer – now there is a story – and from Berkeley took a post doc at Harvard where I worked with Jerome Bruner, and met Eric Erickson and David Riesman and got directed towards psychoanalysis, and met Michael Maccoby who was working with Erich Fromm. Off I went to Mexico and the Mexican Psychoanalytic, which Fromm directed, and had an amazing education in psychoanalysis, philosophy and culture. And I learned to practice psychoanalysis, and appreciate the independence such a life offers – and the many hours of learning to listen, and getting clearer about what really makes a difference. Fromm’s view had always been, how do you put individual dynamics together with social dynamics; in short, for Fromm that meant Freud and Marx. At Caltech, I watched the interaction among physics, and public policy, and the House Un-American Activities Committee. When I went to Berkeley there was the Free Speech Movement and Mario Savio, and then came the Vietnam war, and I experienced the difference between Berkeley and Harvard – kids from mixed up backgrounds who were open and democratic (and sometimes worse), and the children of presumed privilege who didn’t dare touch big issues. I inherited this agenda but had deep misgivings – both about Freud, which Fromm also had, and about Marx, which he had less. The deep task, however, seemed to be an extension of Fromm’s desire to re-humanize psychoanalysis. Freud and Marx are still high on my list of people worth getting to know. They were added to my own pantheon: Piaget, Cassrier, Kenneth Burke, Mumford and later I added a few others: Voegelin being the most important. More recently Roberto Ungar, Keith Hart and Phillip Mirowski. I was fortunate to be able to practice with people open to dialog about themselves, a work I have continued over many years. I continue to look to ways of understanding that practice with deeper ties to science, art and social questions. Maccoby’s work, in which I participated, led in 1976 to the Gamesman and opened the way to consulting. His concepts such as “the psychostructure of the organization” seem to me still-born but powerfully suggestive of future research.

Consulting led me into places I never would have been, many federal agencies at or near the top, including the White House, doing the first major use of the Internet to manage a whole company, one of the great Canadian energy companies, and into Hewlett Packard, IBM, Morgan, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and many others. All of which has led me to question the corporate form if it is not constrained by social needs through the state chartering process. I have been an active user of the Internet since the old dialup days of The Source in 1978, using it as a mode of dialog with clients, making it into corporate infrastructure, and learning environments.

My consulting focus now is on what I like to call ” The economy after this one,” and working with clients who want their organization to be there.

I think of the years practicing, reading, consulting and travels – Mexico, India, Japan, Slovenia, Sweden, Italy, Tunisia, Jordan – as continuing to work with others to put it together, to create a more humane – and interesting – world.

My immediate concerns are political: what to do as the Democrats seem unable to respond to the failure of the Republican leadership.